


We Are Endless Permutation

by HopeStoryteller



Category: Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-12
Packaged: 2021-02-18 05:17:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21739060
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopeStoryteller/pseuds/HopeStoryteller
Summary: A girl with the soul of a dragon climbs Red Mountain.A war hero reborn for the last time dons the Amulet of Kings.A thief kills a dragon, and a priest takes his soul.The Wheel turns on them all.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 62
Collections: Holiday TES Fanfic Fest!





	1. Red

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [liseraptorknight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liseraptorknight/pseuds/liseraptorknight) in the [Holiday_TES_Fanfic_Fest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Holiday_TES_Fanfic_Fest) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
> 
> Something about how history plays out with different people as the heroes.

“You were born too early,” her mother often told her as a child. She didn’t understand what she meant then. She still doesn’t understand what she means now, but she’s beginning to think maybe her mother hadn’t been trying to destroy her self-esteem.

That was just an unfortunate side effect, one that remains with her to this day. Maybe, if her mother hadn’t been convinced she was born too soon—which she tended to translate as _shouldn’t have been born at all_ these days—she wouldn’t have lashed out. Maybe she wouldn’t have done what she did. Maybe she wouldn’t have wound up in prison, or in _Morrowind._

A cliff racer screeches overheard. She swears under her breath and sprints for Balmora.

Technically speaking, it was her own choices that got her here. But she can absolutely blame her mother for a lot of her problems, so it’s not much of a stretch to blame her mother for the rest. Most of it, anyway.

Not noticing the cliff racers until it was almost too late is probably on her.

* * *

Her mother is Altmer. Or maybe, just _maybe_ she’s dead and she can use the past tense for her mother. If only.

Her father was Dunmer, supposedly. Certainly explains the reddish tint to her eyes and her knack for heavier weapons than Altmer were supposed to wield. The first, her mother could explain away. The second is what makes her think that her mother wasn’t prophetic at all and just wanted to get rid of her.

She never met her father. Frankly, she’s fine with that—most of the Dunmer she’s met in Morrowind so far are xenophobic enough to put Summerset to shame and have vaguely hypocritical laws surrounding a lot of things. The most notable example, of course, is that of necromancy, which is illegal unless it’s done by specific people to specific people they’re related to.

It’s just confusing to her. Like most magic is. Magic just… doesn’t click for her, never has and probably never will. She feels naked without a set of heavy armor now, a far cry from the era of her life she usually refers to as Before Prison, and she’s more comfortable with a sword in her hand than she ever was with a spell.

“You’re one of the fastest learners I’ve ever had,” Cosades notes. “Are you sure you have no formal training?”

“I’m an elf,” she replies, “and I only spent a few days in Cyrodiil before… you know.”

Cosades nods. He does know, although she suspects he thinks she isn’t aware of the extent he knows. He’s a damn good spy, he had her convinced that he was an addict when she first sought him out, and yet he has his tells.

She knows he knows, and that’s why he’ll never trust her with anything beyond what she was ordered to.

* * *

She finds out she can shout—or maybe Shout, capital S—in the middle of a Sixth House base. After fighting someone who called her by another name, and nearly killing him.

Yet before she can, she slips. Falls in her armor, which is extremely loud and clanky and probably attracts no small amount of attention from all the noise. Everything hurts now, but all that fades in comparison to one, horrifying realization.

The cloth she’d tied around her face, in order to at least attempt to stay clean of corpus, is gone. And the… thing that probably was once an elf is reaching for her in more ways than one.

Dagoth Gares reaches her mentally before he reaches her physically. Something inside of her bubbles up from within, something she hadn’t known existed until now. Something that pushes back the corprus before it can infect her, and rears its great head inside her.

It wants to lash out. She opens her mouth, and lets it. Words carved into stone flash before her vision, words she had seen long ago and nearly forgotten.

_“FUS RO DAH!”_

* * *

If she ever had corprus, she didn’t have it for very long. When Cosades tells her he thinks she might actually be able to fulfill the Nerevarine prophecy, she laughs mirthlessly. There’s no way it’s her. She thinks she’d know by now if she was Nerevar reborn, would have had at least some fleeting sense of recognition. Instead, she can kill people with nothing but her Voice.

On the way up to Red Mountain, she meets someone who seems perhaps a little too knowing, someone who tells her it might be worth going to Skyrim after this. She’s surprised he thinks there will be an after this for her, more surprised that he knows what she can do.

“This isn’t how it was meant to be fulfilled,” Wulf observes, “but I think you will fulfill it nonetheless. You’re too stubborn to let a little thing like intentions stop you.”

She wants to respond, but she isn’t sure how. She blinks, and he’s gone.

* * *

“You are not Nerevar reborn,” Dagoth Ur notes.

The armored womer before him audibly groans, shifting her weight to her other foot as she does, and then back again. The sword in her hand gleams in the red glow of magma and dark magic. It was once called Trueflame, but it never before belonged to her. She certainly isn’t complaining about a new shiny sword, even if it came with a huge dose of mistaken identity.

“It took you _this long_ to pick up on that?”

Because really, she’s not Nerevar reborn. Not unless Nerevar had the blood of a dragon and the Voice of one, and she’s gathered he didn’t by now. Honestly, it was sheer dumb luck that led to her finding out, but finding out _hey, you’re part dragon and can use cool magic effortlessly because of this_ helps with the whole case-of-mistaken-identity thing.

The Sharmat opens his mouth to respond, but she continues, “Shut the _fuck_ up, I am so fucking _done_ with your bullshit, _FUS RO DAH!”_

* * *

Officially, she never contracted corprus. Unofficially, the same thing that lets her speak death has staved off the majority of its effects. All, that is, but one.

She does go to Skyrim, but she never climbs to the Throat of the World. Instead, she travels the snowy plains of Windhelm and Winterhold, scours the forests of the Rift and Falkreath, and in some ways becomes more dragon than elf.


	2. White

He’s certain that he was supposed to go to Morrowind, and his cellmate wasn’t. He’s less certain that he might be the latest reincarnation of Indoril Nerevar, Moon and Star and all that. The only reason he’s _not_ certain of that part is because most people assumed that the Nerevarine would be an elf.

He really, really isn’t an elf. She was, and in all honesty she was kind of curious to see just how far Azura would go to ensure the prophecies were fulfilled her way or not at all. While news in prison is fairly scarce, the news he _has_ gotten, coupled with Azura going notably silent on the topic of Morrowind, or Resdayn, or whatever in Oblivion the place is called, suggests that that particular set of prophecies may have been filled by his former cellmate.

Good for her. As for him, prison… isn’t _terrible,_ he has a roof over his head and more regular meals than he’d have otherwise, and all the time in the world to make sense of the juxtaposition of who he was and who he is.

And then Uriel Septim enters his life, and leaves it and everyone else’s not an hour later. And he no longer has all the time in the world for anything.

* * *

“Listen,” he doesn’t tell Jauffre, “do we really have _time_ to find his illegitimate kid?”

“Sure, I’ll go find him,” he tells Jauffre, having absolutely no intention of doing so. It’ll take far too long to find someone who may or may not even be alive. If it was this easy for the Mythic Dawn to kill the direct line of succession, it’s likely they’ll have tracked down anyone else even distantly related who could fulfill the requirements of being a dragon blooded emperor.

Instead, he begins work on forming a new covenant with Akatosh. He doesn’t realize until afterwards that the only person he would have ever trusted with the Amulet of Kings was himself. And, possibly, Indoril Nerevar—but that’s a very big maybe, both on whether the long-dead general counts as him or not and whether he would trust Nerevar with this regardless. After all, he did start a war.

…he’s pretty sure Nerevar started the war. That, or he was just very, very guilty over it and the feeling carried over through many, many reincarnations.

* * *

“Who _are_ you?”

The man in question blinks tired eyes. The amulet around his neck is heavy, and hot, but not painfully so. Not like it would be for someone it had rejected. And yet, he’s clearly _not_ a dragon blooded emperor, or a Septim. Apparently that worked. He’s going to pretend he never doubted that it would.

“Honestly,” he says, “I was probably supposed to be dealing with something else, but we don’t have time to find a Septim. So I made a new deal. I’ve gathered I have experience with this sort of thing. Or did. It’s complicated.”

_“Who are you???”_

“Do you want to know my current name or the guy I may or may not have been in a past life? It’s a long story, and involves some prophecies that got messed up, but hey, whatever works, right? Anyway I guess I might be the Emperor now, that’s a thing. You’re welcome to try to depose me but I suspect you don’t want a repeat of all those gates to Oblivion or Mehrunes Dagon rearing his head. So maybe don’t do that.”

Somewhere in an entirely different plane of Oblivion than the one in question, Azura screams in frustration.

* * *

After a few decades, once he has a successor, he fakes his own death before he can be murdered again. He sticks around for long enough to make sure nobody is going to try to assassinate his son, and then he goes on another adventure, blissfully anonymous.

If he maybe encourages the rumors of the Nerevarine having gone to Akavir a little too much, that’s only partially because he was probably _supposed_ to be the Nerevarine. And also, whoever they really are—although he gets the feeling they’re his former cellmate—they probably would appreciate him running interference for however much longer he’ll be around.

Maybe he won’t even be reincarnated this time.


	3. Snow

Martin first meets them, interestingly enough, when they’re both about to die. Everyone in the general vicinity of Darkwater Crossing got caught up in a move that, had Martin not been caught up in it, he might have considered tactical genius.

It _did_ catch Ulfric Stormcloak, as intended. It also caught a considerable amount of his soldiers, a priest, and two thieves. The latter three individuals clearly weren’t Stormcloaks, but that didn’t stop the Imperial Army from sending them all to the chopping block. Because clearly, a priest of Akatosh and a pair of _thieves_ who can barely stand each other, never mind the Stormcloaks, are Stormcloaks.

The first thief, Martin never catches a name before he sprints for freedom and never makes it. The second is on the chopping block when what Martin refuses to call a dragon attacks, saving some lives and quickly ending many others.

Martin winds up sticking with the second thief, a smallish Argonian with a quick wit that more than makes up for the skill they swear they have with a bow.

They really, really can’t use a bow, but they’re good with a sword and funny, so Martin doesn’t mind sticking with them a bit longer on his way to his destination.

* * *

“So you weren’t fucking kidding about you straight-up being descended from the Septims.”

Martin glances at the dragon’s skeleton again. He’s still not entirely sure what happened, but clearly something did because they had stepped in to help, and then he apparently killed the dragon, and then he apparently took the dragon’s soul, which only Dragonborn individuals can do. Which he hadn’t thought he was. Who in their right mind _would_ have thought that?

Ignoring Helgen, and everything that happened there, and… he is _not_ thinking about this right now.

“I was, actually,” Martin mutters. “I have _so many questions_.”

_“DOVAHKIIN!”_

Both look up to the mountain where the shout had come from, then at each other.

“That’s probably you,” his companion says dryly, patting their bow absentmindedly as they do. They _have_ gotten better with it lately, Martin will give them that.

“That’s probably me,” Martin agrees. “As I said. So many questions."

* * *

Martin finds he likes the Greybeards, even if they sideeye his friend a bit too much. In all fairness, they _are_ a thief, and they don’t seem to mind, much. They shrug and say they’ll spend a few days with their buddies in Riften, while he learns the _mystical ways of the dragon._ They also said it exactly like that, which Martin isn’t quite as annoyed by as he should be.

He also finds, when he goes to pick them up from Riften’s Thieves Guild, that he doesn’t mind their friends all that much. Most of them, anyway.

He does _not_ like Delphine, or Mercer Frey. He’d be hard-pressed to choose which individual he hates more for a while, but then Mercer nearly kills his friend and while Delphine is clearly not a nice person either, she’s all talk and no action.

He does like Karliah, even though he’s quite certain he doesn’t know the whole story of what’s going on between her and the Thieves Guild. He knows better than to ask. He’s just glad that his friend is finally learning to shoot.

* * *

Odahviing insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he can only take one person with him. It’s probably for the best. He doesn’t want anyone else to get hurt trying to help him achieve his destiny, to defeat Alduin. As useful as it would be to have his friend and their friend Karliah with him, he knows they have their own things to deal with, and he doesn’t think he’ll be coming back.

Better one person disappears forever after defeating the World-Eater than more than one.

* * *

Well, he didn’t die saving the world. Martin wonders, as he borrows a horse and returns to Riften, why he’d hastily assumed he would. Happy endings are nice, and even better when you find out your friend also didn’t die on their dangerous quest of revenge.

He still hasn’t made it to the Temple of the Divines. He isn’t as bothered by that as he should be.


End file.
